In this chapter, I develop a set of concepts and methodological principles that researchers might draw on as they try to elucidate the processes by which the engagement of humans with their social worlds, material environments, and historical cultures results in the formation of a self in subject, corporeal, and biological dimensions. I forge a conceptual language and rules for analysis that may enable scholars to negotiate converging accounts of how the social norms, lived environments, and power relations through which people develop a sense of self are bound up with processes through which biological organisms compose and recompose themselves over time.

After tactical media became less important, many media activist projects repositioned themselves: in the context of biopolitics they challenge the hegemony of biopower. This volume contains theoretical and empirical contributions to a conference on issues of media activism and biopolitics which has been organized by Innsbruck Media Studies in 2010. Theorists and activists describe and analyze media, whose goal is to enable resistance against regimes of biopower. The control of mobility and v...

The Funambulist Pamphlets is a series of small books archiving articles published on The Funambulist, collected according to specific themes. These volumes propose a different articulation of texts than the usual chronological one. The eleven volumes are respectively dedicated to Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Legal Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, Cruel Designs, Arakawa + Madeline Gins, Science Fiction, Literature, and Cinema. The Funambulist Pamphlets is published as part of the Documents Initiative imprint of the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design, a transdisciplinary media research initiative bridging design and the social sciences, and dedicated to the exploration of the transformative potential of emerging technologies upon the foundational practices of everyday life across a range of settings.

his collection of essays by one of medieval studies’ most brilliant historians argues that the analysis and critique of biopower, as conventionally defined by Michel Foucault and then widely assumed in much contemporary theory of sovereignty, is a sovereign mode of temporalization caught up in the very time-machine it ostensibly seeks to expose and dismantle. For Michel Foucault, biopower (epitomized in his maxim “to make live and to let die”) is the defining sign of the modern, and he famously argued that the task of political philosophy was to cut off the head of the classical (premodern) sovereign, the one “who made die and let live.” Entrapped by his supersessionary thinking on the question, Foucault argued that the maxim of “to make live and let die” of modern sovereignty superseded a premodern sovereignty characterized by the contrasting power “to make die and let live.” The essays collected in Biddick’s book (some reprinted and some published here for the first time) argue that Foucault spoke too soon about the supposed “then” of the classical sovereign and the modern “now,” and this became painfully apparent in his analysis of Nazism in his later lectures, Society Must be Defended. There Foucault groped to articulate an anguishing paradox: How could it be that the Nazis, as the ultimate biopolitical sovereign machine, would insist on an archaic (premodern) mode of sovereignty in their death camps? Here is how he posed the question in that lecture: “How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower?” Foucault left this question hanging.

This book studies how the concepts of body, personhood and privacy can be expanded across disciplinary borders. Notwithstanding the diversity of empirical material and theoretical frameworks, the chapters suggest innovative tools for common key issues: dialogue with the cultural Other, the appropriation of space, and personality. Human embodiment and ethical aspects of representing and regulating cultural practices are a major focus through much of the volume. The book is illustrated with some of the finest examples of Tartu street art.

From the eighteenth-century abolitionist motto Am I Not a Man and a Brother? to the Civil Rights-era declaration I AM a Man, antiracism has engaged in a struggle for the recognition of the humanness of black humanity. It has done so, however, during an era in which the very definition of the human has been called into question by the rising prestige of the biological sciences whose materialist account of human being erodes the grounds of human exceptionalism...Antislavery materialism allowed these authors to respond to scientific racism in its own empirical terms. At the same time, however, it also attenuated their faith in the liberal humanist principles that they champion elsewhere in their work. This antebellum conflict between the liberal ideals of freedom and a materialist ontology of contingency not only presages current critical debates between new materialist and social justice theorists, but reveals an intrinsic tension between posthumanism’s embodied ontology and the...